remembering, remembering, remembering...

"you don't need to judge anybody."

that's something gael told me when we first met in india a few years back. and you know, in all of my searching and studying in the past few years, i still come back to that as the best piece of advice that anyone has ever given to me. best spiritual advice, best life advice. the world, our lives, our minds get so damn torn up with the tempests of ego, the ravages of selfishness, that it can all become pretty bleak and sad. bitterness. resentment. the need to be right. the need to justify one's self. but seriously, fuck it all! we are all capable of things that we wouldn't like to admit. we are all wrong at some point, maybe most of the time in fact. we are all imperfect. you can go crazy over other people's actions and the state of the world. and for what? to feel like a helpless victim in a great, angry, cosmic joke?

this is why i turn to the yogic path. yoga is a science designed to combat the distress of life, not through denial but through non-attachment and awareness. it is an attempt to find equanimity within one's self in order to counter the instability of the outer world. after all, there is absolutely nothing in manifestation that will cease to change, to surprise, to transform. sometimes those permutations will be pleasing to us, sometimes not. sometimes things will gratify our ego, sometimes not. but the yogic path asks: what lies beyond the body, the mind, relationships, work, objects, likes and dislikes, the habits you think of as yourself? who are you when everything is taken away? that's quite the question...

i know i've written on this topic before, maybe many times... but it is always as a reminder to myself. a reminder to stay in my own practice. a reminder that you don't need to judge anybody.
i hope that if i remember these things enough times, that some day i will actually KNOW them.